Indeed, what we have in Lubiewo is a panorama of Poland in years of great turmoil without the stock heroic underground opposition and the stock brutal militia officer. Witkowski’s characters are unheroic, unengaged, unpolitical. For Lukrecja and Patrycja the barracks where Soviet soldiers are stationed (on Polish soil!) are an opportunity, not a symbol of oppression.

In a sense, most of the old guard never fully understood, and certainly never accepted the consequences of, the process they had initiated. If they had, they would have released control of the Workers Party with good grace to De Rossa and the new guard. By not only attempting to hold onto power but reactivating IRA structures in order to do so they ensured both sides lost out in the long term.

As settlers and administrators spread into the region, the world ended for countless indigenous communities in unreported acts of violence. Vast slave kingdoms were established. The legendary Colonel Fawcett remembered: “The atrocities on the Putumayo in Peru, disclosed by Sir Roger Casement, were only a fraction of the terrible story. Slavery bloodshed and vice reigned supreme on the rivers, and there was no halt to it until the bottom fell out of the rubber market.”

Future breakthroughs may reveal that Einstein and his theories of relativity are not entirely correct and like Newton’s theories merely an approximation of nature. To quote Newton again: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Central to Alice Munroe’s aesthetic is the device, though it is really much more than a device, of jumping back and forward in time, enabling readers to hold multiple strands of the narrative in their consciousness, creating cross-sections of event and feeling that allow for rich expression of pathos and irony.

In March 1870 Solano López was finally hunted down in the Paraguayan wilderness of Cerro Corá and killed by a Brazilian soldier. Panchito died with him and Lynch buried them both with her bare hands before being escorted first to Buenos Aires, then to Montevideo, from where she boarded the Royal Mail packet City of Limerick, which brought her back to Europe, fifteen momentous years after the start of her South American sojourn.

The Saxon churches no longer have parishioners and there is not a whisper of German to be heard in the schools, since their pupils and teachers vanished altogether twenty years ago. The prolonged death agony of this community, which started with World War II, ceased abruptly during the early nineties, right after the fall of communism. A single year was all it took to end eight hundred years of history.

"Every jelly mass quivered – shook – moved. A moment more and the reaction had gone to a finish. Denis M’Carthy, Dublin Metropolitan Policeman, true Celt, minor poet, rose to his feet a Chemist." The message of the parable seems to be that science in Ireland is to be understood as a vital modernising force that can dispel the Celtic Twilight of obscurantist romantics.

I saw the people in their yards. I wanted to see people who did not live in the camp, people who had a home, a yard, a room with a carpet, perhaps even a carpet beater. Anywhere that carpets are beaten, I thought, you can believe in peace. Life is civilised there, there people are left in peace.

Ahern’s patience, likeability and almost congenital desire to avoid confrontation helped him. He effectively handed over control of domestic policy to Charlie McCreevy and the PDs. His failure to get agreement on his most favoured policy, the building of a national stadium, showed his lack of power in this area. One policy he was interested in was social partnership, and he effectively used the ever-rising exchequer revenues to buy the compliance of a union movement that was happy to be bought off.

These then are the lives Hastings tackles – those of playwright, short story virtuoso and novelist, traveller, millionaire art collector, exile, homosexual, secret agent and unhinged old man. Maugham had a long life – he published his first books while Queen Victoria was on the throne, and at least one of his lovers, David Posner, lived long enough to die of AIDS in 1985.

French Catholic culture offered a supplementary world, and in some cases a focus for unfulfilled longings, for those who found Free State culture insufficient or repetitive. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Maria Cross can strike today’s reader as brilliantly eccentric, an anomaly; it should instead be regarded as the finest analytical product of a culture we have almost forgotten.

In most communist societies, the intelligentsia, and in particular the artistic intelligentsia – engineers of the human soul in Stalin’s phrase – were afforded the opportunity to feel important and live well, if at the price of a slight (in Russia not so slight) risk of things ending quite badly ... All that was necessary to keep things on the right course was that if kindly advice about the content of one’s work was offered one should take it.

In most communist societies, the intelligentsia, and in particular the artistic intelligentsia – engineers of the human soul in Stalin’s phrase – were afforded the opportunity to feel important and live well, if at the price of a slight (in Russia not so slight) risk of things ending quite badly ... All that was necessary to keep things on the right course was that if kindly advice about the content of one’s work was offered one should take it.